Social Action Has Shaped the UWS Ethical Culture Society for Nearly 150 Years

By Bonnie Eissner

In the beginning, there was a speech by a charismatic 24-year-old who had trained as a rabbi but chose a different path.

On May 15, 1876, Felix Adler spoke in front of invited guests at a rented hall at 42nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan, laying out his vision for a religious movement divorced from a deity that prioritized ethical action, putting deed above creed.

Nearly 150 years later, the Ethical Culture movement he conceived lives on, its original community still operating out of a landmarked Art Nouveau building at West 64th Street and Central Park West.

And despite never reaching the membership of other world religions (at its height in the years after World War II, the New York society had over 1,000 members), the movement has made an outsized difference for social justice, “punching well above its weight in the last century-and-a-half,” Richard Koral, the leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, said at its annual Founders Day meeting earlier this month.

Over the next year, the society will celebrate its upcoming sesquicentennial with public events that honor its origins and carry forward its cause.

“It’s extraordinary how many things the society was engaged with and how impactful it was through its history,” Koral, a retired lawyer with a doctorate of ministry, said in his Founders Day address.

From the outset, Felix Adler initiated ambitious social service projects to improve living conditions for the swelling population of immigrants and laborers in Gilded Age New York. 

A graduate of Columbia College and the son of the rabbi of Temple Emanuel-El, the largest Reform Jewish congregation in the country, Adler was groomed to succeed his father. But while preparing for the rabbinate in Heidelberg, Germany, he read Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, and other writers and philosophers from whom he gained new ideas about serving society and separating morality from a belief in god. 

“Be it ours to hold high the moral ideal, whether we clothe it with personality or not,” Adler said in a lecture to society members published in 1877. “Be it ours to act divine things, no matter how we regard divine mysteries.”

Soon after the New York Society for Ethical Culture was incorporated in 1877, Adler started the District Nursing Service so sick, homebound people in low-income areas of the city could receive medical care. It was the first such program not run by missionaries and became the model for the Visiting Nurse Service, which still exists today.

He founded the first free kindergarten in the United States and, in 1880, the Workingman’s School, a tuition-free school for the children of laborers. That school grew into the Ethical Culture School in 1895 and, in 1928, encompassed the Fieldston School in the Bronx. 

Revealing its priorities, the society constructed the current Ethical Culture School building at West 63rd Street and Central Park West in 1904, years before building its meeting house on the same block. 

In a time of antisemitism, the school attracted wealthy Jewish families and began admitting tuition-paying students as early as 1890. The school is now private, with an annual tuition of over $65,000 for pre-K through 12th grade, and operates separately from the society. The school continues to draw on Adler’s progressive approach to education, and students study ethics. 

Founding the nursing service and the school that bears Ethical’s name would have been an impressive legacy, but the society’s activism went well beyond that. 

Adler, who remained the senior leader of the New York society until his death in 1933, surrounded himself with like-minded reformers who joined the society and served as leaders. In the 1880s, they started New York’s first settlement houses to serve immigrants and the poor. Leaders signed a petition calling for the establishment of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), and Adler served on the first executive committee of the National Urban League. Ethical Culture members helped found the National Civil Liberties Bureau, a precursor to the American Civil Liberties Union. 

Women were initially excluded from membership, but at Adler’s encouragement, they were active in its social services and established a children’s clinic, which became the Blythedale Children’s Hospital, the first independent specialty children’s hospital in New York state. 

In 1959, the society’s Women’s Conference played a prominent role in opening a Planned Parenthood clinic on the Upper West Side. 

Eleanor Roosevelt, a friend and supporter, addressed Ethical Culture members in 1949, when the society was led by prominent social critic Algernon Black; Roosevelt praised the society for likely contributing more than any other group in New York “to better conditions in homes, better conditions between various race groups” in the city. 

The society’s stately meeting house, with its oak-paneled and aptly named Adler Hall, has hosted talks on human rights, social policy, and climate change by Al Gore, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, Ban ki-Moon, and many other artists, leaders, and thinkers. Planning for the 2019 New York City climate strike took place in the building. And earlier this year, it was the site of a packed town hall meeting on fighting President Donald Trump’s agenda, held by Representative Jerrold Nadler and State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal. 

For nearly 40 years, from 1982 until the COVID pandemic in 2020, the society’s Social Service Board co-sponsored a women’s shelter in the building. More recently, the board has centered its outreach efforts on the NYCHA Amsterdam Houses, organizing school supply drives and Thanksgiving turkey giveaways, and arranging free violin lessons and writing programs.    

There are now about 23 Ethical Culture societies around the country, eight of which are near New York. “Originally, it was those who moved out of New York City who brought it with them,” Koral told West Side Rag.

Anyone can join the society (membership dues are pay-what-you-can), and because the New York society is located on the Upper West Side, many of its members are from the neighborhood, Koral said. 

Today, the society counts 175 dues-paying members, a drop, Koral said, from prior years. “We’re in an era now of loneliness and strangers, and people don’t join as much,” he said. “We’re subject to the same forces that every other group experiences.” 

Upper West Sider Amy Schwarz joined Ethical Culture in the early 1990s and remembers when members at its Sunday meetings filled the first floor of the 820-seat Adler Hall. Now, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Lincoln Square, holds its Sunday services in Adler Hall, while Ethical Culture members meet in a smaller room in the building. Still, Schwarz says she finds a strong sense of community. 

“We’re activists,” she said. “We’re not just an insular society; we’re out there with other organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP … even with other churches and religious organizations to protest for things that we believe in.” 

At the Founders Day meeting, Elizabeth Singer, president of the society’s board of trustees, spoke about plans for the year ahead.

“We’re kicking off our 150th anniversary a year ahead so that we can, for the next year, celebrate all different aspects of what makes this Ethical Culture,” she said. The events, she added, will offer “a full understanding of our past … the present, and where the future will be.” 

Scheduled events include a Juneteenth Jazz Jubilee on June 21, a benefit concert for Music on the Inside, which connects formerly incarcerated musicians with professional musicians, and a street fair on September 7. 

Also ahead, with dates to be announced, are a launch of climate activist Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, and a tour of Felix Adler’s gravesite in Hawthorne, New York, and the nearby Blythedale Children’s Hospital.

Information about all events will be posted on the society’s website.

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